If you are standing next to your horse and he looks away, do you think he’s distracted or even disrespectful? When your horse yawns, is he sleepy or bored? If he moves slowly, is he lazy? These are important cues from your horse, are you hearing him correctly?

When it comes to communicating with horses, some humans are a bit like a self-obsessed rock star who throws a temper tantrum and trashes the room, but then assumes everyone wants his autograph. By equine standards, we ignore those around us and begin by screaming bloody-murder and escalate from there. Part of respecting a horse is remembering that their senses are much keener than ours. We can whisper.

It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. ~Mark Twain.

I keep reading FB posts from folks who are sick of all the politics on FB. Just get over it, they say. The election is over. They are correct. The election is over. However, the art of governing goes on. I’ve seen posts I don’t like and I just hide them. I’ve not unfriended anyone, because over and above their thoughts on politics and elections, they are good people. We just see the world differently. Hard to remember sometimes. Bottom line, democracy is messy.

So how do we move past this impasse, where even Facts are questioned and Truth? Truth appears to be in the eye of the beholder.

My newspaper ran a guest editorial in Wednesday’s paper and the author, Chris Satullo, a former columnist and editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer made suggestions for talking with people we disagree with. I’m sharing some of his comments below, but I’ve…

Last week, my online friend Jo-Ann Carson suggested doing blogs on the things we are grateful for, and I agreed to contribute. So I’m returning to blogging by talking about three things I appreciate. Of course, my loving, supportive husband and my fabulous kids and grandchildren are at the top of my list, but today I’m focusing other things I’m so glad to have.

I’m extremely grateful for the wonderful horses that shared my life for so long. They taught me so much and gave their unconditional love when things times were difficult. I was born horse-crazy and never had any fear of the big animals, even as a toddler. I was convinced they would never hurt me. One of my earliest memories was of Babs, my brother’s horse. She was a sweet thing that I used to ride around the neighborhood when I was three or four. I also used to pester her when she was grazing, trying to make her do a trick. One day she’d apparently had enough and I went crying into the house with the top of my head all slobbery, saying Babs had pulled my hair. One of my first lessons in respect for another being.

(Not me, but could have been. 🙂 )

All the horses I’ve dealt with have taught me different things. One of the most important was that praise and carrots accomplished much more than harshness. As a twelve-year old with no formal instruction, I was able to teach my Star circus tricks with just carrots and persistence. The habit of praise and reward are so ingrained in me, I do it automatically with any animal I encounter.

Another set of things I’m very grateful for are the spectacular sunsets I can see from our new house. We are now up in the hills with a wooded slope on one side that drops down into the canyon behind us. Since this area is Regional Open Space, our only neighbors are deer, wild turkeys, raccoons, hawks, vultures and lots of other birds, including a large owl who has recently started coming by in the evenings. Unfortunately, coyotes are also part of this open area, as we discovered when our elderly cat disappeared on Labor Day.

On the other side of our house, we can see a portion of San Francisco Bay and with this view comes mind-blowing sunsets. For most of my adult life, I’ve lived 30-40 minutes from the ocean, so I’ve seen many wonderful sunsets. However, the ones I see from up here are simply spectacular. I’m not sure why they seem so much better, but I certainly love them.

The last thing I’ll give thanks for today is my new knee. Last March, after many long years of my right leg not working properly, and many attempts to make it better without surgery (including a type of stem cell therapy), I finally gave in and had my knee replaced. The surgery went well, but the anesthesiologist gave me a medicine I had told him I couldn’t tolerate, so the aftermath was more unpleasant than it needed to be. Despite that, I recovered well and am now amazed at being able to walk normally again. Even when my knee didn’t hurt, I couldn’t move freely and had to be careful. Now I can do stairs and hike the hills much more easily. Next month, I’ll do my left knee and should be able to take on the trails behind our house with little problem. I don’t look forward to the recovery phase, but I’ve found an excellent physical therapy clinic and know they’ll make it as painless as possible.

So, what are you grateful for? In this difficult time, it’s wise to focus on the good things in our lives. What makes you smile? What inspires you to dance?

I read an awesome article, Mythbusting the Amazon Algorithm Reviews and Ranking for Authors, by Kate Baum on SPR (Self-Publishing Review) recommended by an author on the Guppie loop. I can`t reblog it as it’s not a WP blog, so I thought instead I’d examine three of the myths she talk about. I highly recommend the whole article

“MYTH 1 – Nobody knows how the Amazon Algorithm Works

TRUTH – Yes they do.

The Amazon Algorithm is an A9 algorithm, a pretty run-of-the-mill product search engine with a personalization built in. A9 is a company in Palo Alto that creates product algorithms, code that tells Amazon’s website how to sort and load product lists for each customer’s experience. Anyone who wants to read about how this algorithm works has to do nothing more than search for information online and read the manuals, forums, science articles, and a myriad…

We put down my last horse three weeks ago. Glory (officially Fallen Queen) was 31, mostly blind from cataracts, had Cushings disease and arthritis. I hadn’t ridden her for the past two years because her blindness caused her to stumble and, with her arthritis, I couldn’t take a chance on her falling. As long as she was in a familiar place her lack of sight hadn’t seemed to bother her too much until recently. Then things changed.

A couple of months ago, she somehow hurt herself in her stall, cutting her upper eyelid, and injuring her hip and front leg. Presumably she got tangled in a fence when rolling and had a hard time getting free. We had to have the vet out for her eye, but the other stuff healed quickly. She became jumpy and nervous after that, not understanding why she hurt and what…

On July 7, 2012 a group of neuroscientists met at Cambridge to discuss the overwhelming amount of research that has been done that proves that non-human animals are conscious in a way very similar to humans. Witnessed by Stephen Hawking, these prominent scientists signed a document entitled The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating:

“Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds…

So excited! The @SVRWAChapter has a spot on Lit Crawl in San Francisco on Oct. 17. It’s where 10,000 people come out to hear literature over 3 hours and hundreds of different authors! Yeah for readers!

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Join bestselling and up-and-coming SVRWA authors for a deliciously decadent taste of modern romance, with readings that range from sweet to sexy to downright salacious.

Today I’m talking about some of the changes in how horses are now cared for. In recent years alternative or complementary medicine has become as important in veterinary health care as it has in human care. Chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, etc. are now widely accepted treatments for animals and more and more techniques are being developed as we speak. The top equine athletes regularly use complementary treatments. But it wasn’t always this way.

Portia at 29

When I got my mare Portia over twenty years ago, alternative care for animals was in its infancy and generally frowned on by traditional veterinarians. While I, myself, had tried acupuncture for a chronic bursitis, I wasn’t really that open to alternative techniques. But trying to help my sweet mare cured me of that attitude and introduced me to a new way of looking at life.

Portia was a beautiful, grey Anglo-Arab with wonderful gaits, a very willing attitude and a delightful joy in life. While she could be silly, mostly she was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, after I’d had her for about six months, she developed unusual problems that the vets couldn’t figure out. First, she started having trouble going down hills. Then she began tripping over things if we rode at dusk. Finally she began to stumble and fall to the ground. Now lots of horses stumble, but rarely do they go down. This was weird as well as dangerous. And I had the bruises to prove it.

We went through a variety of diagnoses. Navicular disease—but the x-rays and the lack of response to shoeing changes and medicines seemed to rule that out. Weak stifles—but injections and keeping her on hill didn’t change anything.

This went on for about a year and a half and I was ready to give up on her when a friend suggested trying chiropractic. I hadn’t heard of equine chiro before and resisted the idea for quite a while. Then I heard about a vet who did acupuncture and worked with a chiropractor, and I decided to give it a try. If a vet was supervising, maybe there was some worth to it.

The acupuncture to relax the muscles, followed by chiropractic treatment to correct the misalignments in Portia’s spine and sacrum, produced an amazing and immediate improvement. I was ecstatic! I would have my talented, fun horse back again.

The jubilation only lasted a few weeks, then Portia started having problems again. It turned out that the chiro put things right for a while, but didn’t correct whatever was causing her back to go out in the first place. While I continued to use chiropractic on all my horses, I now began a journey through just about every alternative modality that existed, in an effort to find a solution to Portia’s trouble.

Finally, I encountered a woman who was learning a new-to-the-USA technique called Integrative Manual Therapy. For the first time we got improvements that lasted. She was actually able get to the cause of some of Portia’s problems and many times fix them.

Jacquie’s main work is with people and she only occasionally works on horses. Both my husband and I have gone to her and benefited greatly from her work. Through her I’ve met several other manual therapists, most of whom also work both with humans and animals.

IMT is only one of many alternative techniques that have been more easily accepted in the animal world because the results cannot be simply discounted as a “placebo effect.” When a horse moves off better after being worked on, it’s not a trick of the mind. Something has changed.

Stem cell therapy is another “alternative” veterinary treatment that has led the way to acceptance in human medicine. While still considered experimental by insurance companies, it is used quite commonly on animals. Hopefully, it too will soon be standard in human medicine. (My knees would certainly appreciate that.)

When I began writing fiction seriously a few years ago, I thought it would be interesting to have a protagonist who was a Manual Therapist. The story possibilities were many, and I might also introduce some readers to alternative techniques. The result was my book FOREWARNING.

I’d love to hear your reaction to the heroine, Kasey Martin, and the work she does.

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Here’s a small excerpt from FOREWARNING, showing Kasey working on a horse.

Then she put both hands on the horse and just stood there. After a minute she shifted position and again stood without moving.

“What is she doing?” TJ asked Billy, who had come into the barn too.

Billy glanced at Kasey and gave a shrug. “She’s listening,” he replied.

“What do you mean, listening?” TJ turned to the younger man with a disbelieving frown.

“That’s what she calls it—listening to the body, to figure out what needs to be done. I’m no expert. I just know she does some pretty amazing things. Watch.”

So TJ did watch while Kasey finished her initial assessment and stepped back to make notes on her chart. Then with a determined expression, she placed one hand on the mare’s spine and another low on her left hip. She kept them there for almost ten minutes while talking softly to the horse and Ben. As far as TJ could see, she was doing nothing more than lightly touching the horse.

All of a sudden, Doll let out a big sigh and visibly relaxed, dropping her head low and almost closing her eyes. Kasey stepped away, and tension seemed to flow out of her as well. A few moments later, with a much calmer expression, she moved back to the horse. She continued to hold her hands in different spots for varying amounts of time, changing their position after Doll sighed or yawned. Obviously, something was happening, but TJ had no idea what.

At one point Doll swung her head around and touched her ribs, just behind her front legs. Kasey nodded. “I know,” she said, and kept on with what she was doing. A few minutes later Doll twisted around again and touched her side a couple more times. Kasey smiled and responded. “I’ll get to it. I know it hurts. I need to take care of this first.”

TJ widened his eyes in disbelief. The horse is telling her where it hurts? At that point, he almost left in disgust to go back to the house, but hesitated when he saw how seriously Ben and Billy were watching. Pushing down his skepticism, he decided to wait and see how her treatment played out.

A while later Kasey finally switched her attention to the area Doll had touched. The mare bobbed her head up and down a couple of times, then let it hang in total relaxation. After spending a good ten minutes working on the area, Kasey stepped back.

Since the title of my blog is Conversations With Horses, today I thought I’d talk to a couple of horses. Fictional ones, of course, featured in my book Forewarning. They are based on ones I’ve known and hopefully will give you an insight into horses’ minds.

The first horse to appear in Forewarning is Paris, a brash adventurous type, who finds a gate unlatched and decides to explore. (Unfortunately, a young filly follows along.)

So Paris tell us about yourself.

“My real name is Harrbit’s Parisienne. I’m a beautiful dappled grey Anglo-Arab. That means I’m half Thoroughbred and half Arabian—horse royalty. I was bred for Three Day Eventing and I loved to jump, particularly in the show ring where people noticed and admired me. Something bad happened to me before I came to live with Kasey; I don’t like to talk about that. Kasey fixed me up but I don’t get to jump any more. I miss all the attention and fussing and special things associated with showing.

What do you do now?

I alternate between having foals–oh how I love my babies—and being a trail horse. Dancer and I make really nice foals and Kasey lets me keep them for six or seven months and then waits until the following year to breed me again. After my babies are weaned, I become her trail horse and ride the mountains with her. I love exploring new trails. I get enthralled and walk so fast other horses have a hard time keeping up. But I don’t like it when things change on familiar trails. I have to look very carefully to be sure that big branch or rock slide isn’t something to run from. Once in a while, I’ll play games with Kasey and pretend to be afraid when I’m really not. She usually figures it really quickly and stops my fun. That’s okay, I love her and always run to gate when she comes.

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Now I’m going to skip to the most important horse on ranch—Dancer, Kasey’s regal stallion.

“My name is Willow’s Sundancer and I am a chestnut Trakehner stallion. My breed developed in East Prussia in the 1700’s and were used as cavalry horses. It is the oldest of the European warmbloods. Like Paris, I was bred for Eventing too, but I also quite enjoy dressage. Kasey bought me as a yearling and trained me. We competed for a few years and I was very successful. I had lots of admirers, which is why I am so popular as a breeding stallion. I have offspring all over the world,.

Now I have an even more important job—protecting the ranch. As a stallion, I must make sure my herd, which includes Kasey, is safe from danger. While I may romp and play, I never relax my vigil. I’m very aware of everything that goes on and ready to take action if necessary. Of course, I’m also quite interested in the ladies and wish I could live with the mare herd. Unfortunately, Kasey doesn’t agree. I definitely could do without the pesty geldings. They can be so ridiculous at times.

Hope you enjoyed meeting the horses. You can learn more about them and others on the ranch in my book FOREWARNING

If you have horses, what are they like? What kind of personality does your animal have?